The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (6 page)

“It won’t stop the dreams,” I said. “Even if we kept a death from happening, it wouldn’t stop the dreams.” He never listened. He wanted them to die. He wanted to take notes on how they died and how my dreams matched their dying, and he wasn’t going to call anyone back until he was ready to. 

“This isn’t war, Mary,” he told me one day. “This is a kind of science and it has its own rules. You’ll have to trust me, Mary.” 

He pushed the hair out of my eyes, because I was crying. He wanted to touch me. I know that now. 

I tried to get messages out. I tried to figure out who I’d dreamed about. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and try to talk to anybody I could and figure it out. I’d say, “Do you know a guy who’s got red hair and is from Alabama?” I’d say, “Do you know an RTO who’s short and can’t listen to anything except Jefferson Airplane?” Sometimes it would take too long. Sometimes I’d never find out who it was, but if I did, I’d try to get a message out to him. Sometimes he’d already gone out and I’d still try to get someone to send him a message—but that just wasn’t done. 

I found out later Bucannon got them all. People said yeah, sure, they’d see that the message got to the guy, but Bucannon always got them. He told people to say yes when I asked. He knew. He always knew. 

I didn’t have a dream about Steve and that was the important thing. 

When I finally dreamed that Steve died, that it took more guys in uniforms than you’d think possible—with more weapons than you’d think they’d ever need—in a river valley awfully far away, I didn’t tell Bucannon about it. I didn’t tell him how Steve was twitching on the red earth up North, his body doing its best to dodge the rounds even though there were just too many of them, twitching and twitching, even after his body wasn’t alive anymore. 

I cried for a while and then stopped. I wanted to feel something but I couldn’t. 

I didn’t ask for pills or booze and I didn’t stay awake the next two nights scared about dreaming it again. There was something I needed to do. 

I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know whether Steve’s team—the one in the dream—had already gone out or not. I didn’t know a thing, but I kept thinking about what Bucannon had said, the “fixity,” how maybe the future couldn’t be changed, how even if Bucannon hadn’t intercepted those messages something else would have kept the future the way it was and those guys would have died anyway. 

I found the Green Beanie medic who’d taken me to my hooch that first day. I sat down with him in the mess. One of Bucannon’s types was watching us but I sat down anyway. I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” And he said, “I’m not supposed to say, Lieutenant. You know that.” 

“Yes, Captain, I do know that. I also know that because you took me to my little bunker that day I will probably dream about your death before it happens, if it happens here. I also know that if I tell the people running this project about it, they won’t do a thing, even though they know how accurate my dreams are, just like they know how accurate Steve Balsam is, and Blakely, and Corigiollo, and the others, but they won’t do a thing about it.” I waited. He didn’t blink. He was listening. 

“I’m in a position, Captain, to let someone know when I have a dream about them. Do you understand?” 

He stared at me. 

“Yes,” he said. 

I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” 

“No, he hasn’t.” 

“Do you know anything about the mission he is about to go out on?” 

He didn’t say a thing for a moment. Then he said, “Red Dikes.” 

“I don’t understand, Captain.” 

He didn’t want to have to explain—it made him mad to have to. He looked at the MD type by the door and then he looked back at me. 

“You can take out the Red Dikes with a one-K nuclear device, Lieutenant. Everyone knows this. If you do, Hanoi drowns and the North is down. Balsam’s team is a twelve-man night insertion beyond the DMZ with special MACV ordnance from a carrier in the South China Sea. All twelve are talents. Is the picture clear enough, Lieutenant?” 

I didn’t say a thing. I just looked at him. 

Finally I said, “It’s a suicide mission, isn’t it. The device won’t even be real. It’s one of Bucannon’s ideas—he wants to see how they perform, that’s all. They’ll never use a nuclear device in Southeast Asia and you know that as well as I do, Captain.” 

“You never know, Lieutenant.” 

“Yes, you do.” I said it slowly so he would understand. 

He looked away. 

“When is the team leaving?” 

He wouldn’t answer anymore. The MD type looked like he was going to walk toward us. 

“Captain?” I said. 

“Thirty-eight hours. That’s what they’re saying.” 

I leaned over. 

“Captain,” I said. “You know the shape I was in when I got here. I need it again. I need enough of it to get me through a week of this place or I’m not going to make it. You know where to get it. I’ll need it tonight.” 

As I walked by the MD type at the door I wondered how he was going to die, how long it was going to take, and who would do it. 

I killed Bucannon the only way I knew how. 

I started screaming at first light and when he came to my bunker, I was crying. I told him I’d had a dream about him. I told him I dreamed that his own men, guys in cammies and all of them talents, had killed him, they had killed him because he wasn’t using a nurse’s dreams to keep their friends alive, because he had my dreams but wasn’t doing anything with them, and all their friends were dying. 

I looked in his eyes and I told him how scared I was because they killed her, too, they killed the nurse who was helping him, too. 

I told him how big the nine-millimeter holes looked in his fatigues, and how something else was used on his face and stomach, some smaller caliber. I told him how they got him dusted off soon as they could and got him on a sump pump and IV as soon as he hit Saigon, but it just wasn’t enough, how he choked to death on his own fluids. 

He didn’t believe me. 

“Was Lieutenant Balsam there?” he asked. 

I said no, he wasn’t, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why, but he wasn’t, I said. 

His eyes changed. He was staring at me now. 

He said, “When will this happen, Mary?” 

I said I didn’t know—not for a couple of days at least, but I couldn’t be sure, how could I be sure? It felt like four, maybe five, days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was crying again. This is what made him believe me in the end. 

He knew it would never happen if Steve were there—but if Steve was gone, if the men waited until Steve was gone? 

Steve would be gone in a couple of days and there was no way that this nurse, scared and crying, could know this. 

He moved me to his bunker and had someone hang canvas to make a hooch for me inside his. He doubled the guards and changed the guards and doubled them again, but I knew he didn’t think it was going to happen until Steve left. 

I cried that night. He came to my hooch. He said, “Don’t be frightened, Mary. No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anyone.” 

But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried to stop a dream from coming true—even though I’d asked him to—and he didn’t know whether he could or not. 

I told him I wanted him to hold me, someone to hold me. I told him I wanted him to touch my forehead the way he did, to push my hair back the way he did. 

At first he didn’t understand, but he did it. 

I told him I wanted someone to make love to me tonight, because it hadn’t happened in so long, not with Steve, not with anyone. He said he understood and that if he’d only known he could have made things easier on me. 

He was quiet. He made sure the flaps on my hooch were tight and he undressed in the dark. I held his hand just like I’d held the hands of the others, back in Cam Ranh Bay. I remembered the dream, the real one where I killed him, how I’d held his hand while he got undressed, just like this. 

Even in the dark I could see how pale he was and this was like the dream, too. He seemed to glow in the dark even though there wasn’t any light. I took off my clothes, too. I told him I wanted to do something special for him. He said fine, but we couldn’t make much noise. I said there wouldn’t be any noise. I told him to lie down on his stomach on the cot. I sounded excited. I even laughed. I told him it was called “around the world” and I liked it best with the man on his stomach. He did what I told him and I kneeled down and lay over him. 

I jammed the needle with the morphine into his jugular and when he struggled I held him down with my own weight. 

No one came for a long time. 

When they did, I was crying and they couldn’t get my hand from the needle. 

Steve’s team wasn’t sent. The dreams stopped, just the way Bucannon thought they would. Because I killed a man to keep another alive, the dreams stopped. I tell myself now this was what it was all about. I was supposed to keep someone from dying—that’s why the dreams began—and when I did, they could stop, they could finally stop. Bucannon would understand it. 

“There is no talent like yours, Mary, that does not operate out of the psychological needs of the individual,” he would have said. “You dreamed of death in the hope of stopping it. We both knew that, didn’t we. When you killed me to save another, it could end, the dreams could stop, your gift could return to the darkness where it had lain for a million years—so unneeded in civilization, in times of peace, in the humdrum existence of teenagers in Long Beach, California, where fathers believed their daughters to be whores or lesbians if they went to war to keep others alive. Am I right, Mary?” 

This is what he would have said. 

They could have killed me. They could have taken me out into the jungle and killed me. They could have given me a frontal and put me in a military hospital like the man in ’46 who had evidence that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl. The agency Bucannon had worked for could have sent word down to have me pushed from a chopper on the way back to Saigon, or had me given an overdose, or assigned me to some black op I’d never come back from. There were a lot things they could have done, and they didn’t. 

They didn’t because of what Steve and the others did. They told them you’ll have to kill us all if you kill her or hurt her in any way. They told them you can’t send her to jail, you can send her to a hospital but not for long, and you can’t fuck with her head, or there will be stories in the press and court trials and a bigger mess than My Lai ever was. 

It was seventy-six talents who were saying this, so the agency listened. 

Steve told me about it the first time he came. I’m here for a year, that’s all. There are ten other women in this wing and we get along—it’s like a club. They leave us alone. 

Steve comes to see me once a month. He’s married—to the same one in Merced—and they’ve got a baby now, but he gets the money to fly down somehow and he tells me she doesn’t mind. 

He says the world hasn’t turned blue since he got back, except maybe twice, real fast, on freeways in central California. He says he hasn’t floated out of his body except once, when Cathy was having the baby and it started to come out wrong. It’s fading away, he says, and he says it with a laugh, with those big eyelashes and those great shoulders. 

Some of the others come, too, to see if I’m okay. Most of them got out as soon as they could. They send me packages and bring me things. We talk about the mess this country is in, and we talk about getting together, right after I get out. I don’t know if they mean it. I don’t know if we should. I tell Steve it’s over, we’re back in the Big PX and we don’t need it anymore—Bucannon was right—and maybe we shouldn’t get together. 

He shakes his head. He gives me a look and I give him a look and we both know we should have used the room that night in Cam Ranh Bay, when we had the chance. 

“You never know,” he says, grinning. “You never know when the baby might wake up.” 

That’s the way he talks these days, now that he’s a father. 

“You never know when the baby might wake up.” 

Dream Baby 

Story Notes
 

In l971, thanks to mutual friends, I met a Vietnam vet by the name of Art who’d been back from the war for about a year and was, well, working as a bodyguard at the time, and carrying, in what I thought was a sports-gear case, an H&K assault rifle. We were stuck together in a bus station while those mutual friends chatted. When Art and I had used up the usual small talk, there was a long silence and he finally said, “So you’re a science fiction writer. Here’s something for you. In firefights in Nam, the world—I don’t know exactly how to say this—turned blue for me and slowed down and I’d—I’d leave my body to see what I needed to do. That’s the only way I know how to put it. I came back from every fight because of it and that’s why certain people were interested in me after the war. They didn’t care about how I did it—just that I did—that I came back from every firefight.” Art wasn’t bragging; he also wasn’t, as I learned over the years that we’d be friends, playing head games with me. He liked people and marveled at the universe, and he didn’t care whether I believed him or not; I found that more persuasive than anything else. Over the course of our friendship I received hard evidence that many of his tallest tales (like “certain people” being interested in him after the war) were true; but as a science fiction writer I didn’t really need to have proof of what he was saying about his ESP experiences that day or any other. I needed only to find in his stories about combat ESP a sense of wonder and vision of the human condition—what we received as gifts and talents, what we do with them in life, and how others may try to use them: the stuff of fiction, and science fiction in particular. I also knew that day, as I decided to commit to however long it would take to research and write a novel about combat ESP, that this project would allow me, out of the survivor’s guilt I was starting to feel (as I met more and more guys who’d gone in my stead to Vietnam), to get to know the other half of my generation (those who hadn’t remained safely in college), to do whatever penance I felt, as the son of an Annapolis graduate, I should do, and to fully understand a war I’d creatively avoided and profoundly believed neither hawks nor doves truly understood. That decision would lead to fifteen years of paper research into right-wing and left-wing politics; interviews with scholars and policymakers and extreme organizations; access to still-classified plans to end the war in Vietnam; but, most importantly, to interviews and correspondence with two hundred vets of three American conflicts—veterans ranging from a barefoot grunt from West Virginia to a former CIA director—many of whom had had ESP experiences both in combat and later.